Since Ubuntu is getting so fantastically popular nowadays I thought this might be useful to some of you.

I personally think Ubuntu is great, the features, ease of installation, stability and especially the work they have done on things like wireless drivers make it a breeze to get up and running.

It is a pretty secure distro by default, but there are a few little things you can do to tighten it up.

If you don’t know what Ubuntu is you can check it out here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.

If you wan’t to get into Linux I suggest you try this and Mandriva first.

Anyway recently I found a good security guide for Ubuntu, so run through the steps and lock your OS down.

If you’ve recently switched from Windows to the Linux distribution Ubuntu, you’ve probably experienced a decrease in spyware — and malware in general — on your system. But although Ubuntu is billed as the ultra-secure solution, you should know that even though Ubuntu’s default install has its flaws, like every other operating system.

The Big Ol’ Ubuntu Security Resource

I came across this while browsing, has some pretty solid stuff, goes deeper than most basic Linux security guides.

It has some good sections like this on protection against fork bombs:

Fork bombs are programs that keep creating child processes until system resources are all used, they actually aren’t remote exploits because they require a local user to execute the bomb, however, users may be tricked into running a fork bomb, for example the following example may look innocent, but running it on an unprotected system may take the whole system down:

:( ){ : |:& }; :

WARNING: do NOT run the above code on an unprotected system!

The above shell script will actually keep forking at an exponential rate until system resources are exhausted.

To protect a system against such attacks, there is a file for limiting the number of processes for each user, it is /etc/security/limits.conf, add the following two lines to it:
@users soft nproc 100
@users hard nproc 150

The lines prevent anyone in the users group from having more than 150 processes, and issue a warning at 100 processes.

Your system may not have a users group, so you may need to edit the lines to suit your needs.

There are some other things you can do like using a file integrity checker, installing a log checker or centralising logs with something like syslog-ng, scanning for SU files on a regular basis, setup alerts if a new user is added and so on, but this gives you a start.

It has some security tips for OpenSSH, Samba and MySQL too.

I recommend taking a look anyway!

Tips to Secure Linux Workstation